Nothing special can be done for us now.
We are reduced to drawing parable
from nonsense verse and snatches allowed
us of foreign poets hysterical
at their own cloistering, ever more sure.
We garden, watch faces wrinkling with age,
our children learning. They will mature
inside this, they too long to turn the page.
***
On the occasion of a conference in Budapest in 1976, I met several aspiring young Slovak writers and poets. It was an exciting time for them, since the bookstores in Budapest were more liberal than in Bratislava. There was even a copy of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, though in Hungarian, which it turned out a few of them could read, belonging to the Magyar minority at home.
After a prolonged but fruitless flirtation, one of them seduced me into smuggling, once I got back to Montreal, the pages of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees cut and pasted into the cover and jacket of another now forgotten work, one as innocuous to the censors who read her mail as would be the unaltered copy of Alice in Wonderland I was to place in the same parcel.
I never saw nor heard from her again so don’t know if the package ever arrived. I dared to place her voice into the poem above, inspired by her actual words quoted in the first line.
In Levity, there is a limerick of sorts on the encounter.